Dave Dawson at Dunkirk

by Robert Sidney Bowen

"Start her off, Dave," came the dull answer. "This is the last load. I'm riding with you. The Captain and his staff are using my ambulance. Man, but I'm tired!"

"Check," Dave grunted and shifted into first. "The last load, huh? And it's just getting dark. Well, anyway, we licked 'em. The Nazis won't find anything there. Lean back and try to get a nap, Freddy."

"And you perhaps fall asleep at that wheel, and tip us into a ditch?" Freddy said with a forced chuckle. "No thanks. I'll stay awake and try to keep you that way, too. By the by, though, Dave. You've made more trips than anybody. Want me to drive this one?"

"Not a chance!" Dave said and suddenly realized that he was laughing for the first time in hours. "I still remember that ride you gave me in that Belgian scouting car. Nix. I'll do the driving. You just relax, Freddy. But, boy, will I be glad when this trip is over!"

"I'll be jolly well pleased, myself, you can bet!" Freddy murmured and stretched out his legs. "I think I shall sleep for another eight days, and not care a darn what the blasted Nazis do about it."

For the next twenty minutes that was the last spoken between the two. They were both too tired even to talk. Besides, there was little to talk about save the experiences they had had on the road. Those they could save until another day. And after all there was still this trip to complete. And so they rode along in silence. The sun slid down over the western lip of the world, and night and the Germans came sweeping up from the east. Dave kept his head lights switched off until it was too dangerous to continue further without them. Perhaps it had just been chance, or perhaps Goering's pilots had found out that the Lille Hospital cases were being evacuated over that road. Anyway, the Stukas and the light Heinkels had given it a terrific pounding all day long, and it was now well spotted with craters. To try to drive along it in the dark would be exactly the same as driving the ambulance over the edge of a cliff. It would be suicide, to say the least.

Dave hesitated a moment, though, with his hand on the switch and listened intently. Behind him there was the incessant dull rumble of the guns, punctuated every now and then by the loud thunder of a land mine going off. In the sky there was the drone of wings, but the droning was not close.

"Keep an eye peeled, will you, Freddy?" Dave said and turned the switch. "I've got to have lights or we'll go right into a shell hole. If you hear something coming, yell, and I'll switch off these things."

"Right-o!" Freddy called wearily and stuck his head out the door window and looked up. "All clear, now, though. None of the blighters near us. I say, what's up, now?"

Dave didn't bother to answer. He, too, had spotted the waving flashlight just up the road. He slipped the car out of gear, steered it around the rim of a yawning bomb crater and let it roll to a stop. A British infantry officer, with a Military Police band on his tunic sleeve, ran up to Dave's side of the ambulance and flashed his light in Dave's eyes for a second.